Eisner Winner Rutu Modan on Jamilti and Other Stories

By Michael C. Lorah August 6, 2008 05:07am ET

Modan on Jamilti and Other Stories

While she’s just won the Eisner for Exit Wounds, Rutu Modan isn’t about to rest on her laurels. In September, Drawn + Quarterly will release Jamilti and Other Stories, a collection of the creators short stories.

We spoke with her about the upcoming volume.
Newsarama: Rutu, all of the stories in Jamilti and Other Stories pre-date Exit Wounds, correct?
Rutu Modan: All except “Your Number One Fan,” which I wrote after Exit Wounds for the new Actus anthology, How to Love, which was published in January 2008. (Newsarama Note: How to Love
was recently released in the U.S. by Top Shelf) It was created
after I moved to Sheffield, England, and the story is located in my new
hometown.
NRAMA: “Jamilti” was previously in Drawn & Quarterly vol. 5. Excepting that story, have any of them been published in English before?
RM: Except "Jamilti" all the stories appeared in Actus
anthologies that were originally published in English and distributed
in America and Europe as well as in Israel, but their distribution was
quite small and most of the anthologies are out of stock already, so I
hope the stories might get a second chance to reach new readers.
NRAMA: You say in the author's note that many of the comics are
inspired by old family photos. I can see the family influence in
several of the stories. What is it about the photos that gets you
thinking about telling stories?
RM: A family photo is a condensed story. Looking at one, you
have characters, you have location, relationships, time—everything you
need for a story. Somehow it is easier to notice that in old photos. It
might be because the photos then were better—people used to choose what
they were shooting, and then couldn't delete so easily, compared to how
most of us use digital cameras nowadays.
The world (or life) is too loaded; it is difficult to concentrate on
the essence of each detail. A photo is like focusing on one moment,
which represents a certain idea, a certain truth—exactly what a story
does.
I have a large collection of old family photos, most of it my own
family, but I also go from time to time to flea markets and look for
other families' old albums. When I am out of ideas for an illustration
or a story, I often turn to the collection to look for one.
NRAMA: Do you base any panels on those actual photos?
RM: “King of the Lilies” is actually based on my grandmother's
album from her teens in Poland of the 1920s. Lily, the heroine, is
based upon her image. In “The Panty Killer” I used for the location my
Mother's childhood apartment. Also, there are family photos that I used
in Exit Wounds. (See attached photos and relevant frames above.)
NRAMA: Getting in to the actual stories, I particularly liked
the duplicitous motivations of the daughter in “Energy Blockage,”
working to see her father again. I noticed that “Bygone” also has a
search for a lost parent as well. What inspired those stories?
RM: There are quite few absent parents in my stories—it wasn't a
conscious decision to write about this subject, it just happened. I can
think of 2 main reasons. (It is quite personal to answer, like giving
myself an analysis.)
1) I lost both my parents some years ago; I miss them a lot, and probably cannot stop waiting for them to come back somehow.
2) The search for lost parents (usually a father) is an archetypal
subject in our culture and you have thousands of versions of this
subject in literature, from Oedipus to The Darjeeling Limited.
Having said that, in the stories you mentioned (“Bygone” and “Energy
Blockage”), the absent parent is only a background theme. “Bygone” for
me was more about my own struggle with the new experience at the time
of becoming a mother myself, trying to understand what this role
actually means. “Energy Blockage” was inspired by an ad I saw in the
paper for Luna the Electric Woman.
Apparently her powers were able to cure maladies where conventional
medicine failed. The advertisement featured a big woman with many
spoons and forks sticking to her face, hands and leg. That image was
the inspiration for the story.
NRAMA: “The Panty Killer” is very violent compared to your other comics. How did that tale evolve?
RM: Actually, the story is based on a personal experience, which
is one of my darkest secrets. I never told anyone till now: it was my
high school graduation, a big ceremony. My mother was on the stage
giving the parents' speech, which was bad enough, using all the clichés
and giving parental advice that no one was interested to hear, and
then… she burped! Loudly, into the microphone, in front of the
teachers, the parents, not to mention my fellow students. Everybody
started laughing, of course, the combination of her pompous speech and
the burp was hilarious—not for me. I was devastated. You know how it is
with parents when you are a teenager. For years it kept jumping into my
mind at unexpected moments, making me red and uncomfortable—even though
I knew probably no one remembered it except me.
I found out that miserable moments are good material for stories,
especially if they happen to be ridiculous too. So I wrote this script
about a woman who is trying to destroy all the people who were
witnessing what she thinks was her mother being humiliated. Writing
this story really made me feel better, and it was far less violent than
murdering all my high school friends.
NRAMA: That’s hilarious! And I was curious about why you
approached “Homecoming,” one of the book's best stories, I thought,
using only full-page images.
RM: In each of the Actus projects, the first thing we decide on
is the format. Each time we change the format, to make it interesting
for us. “The Homecoming” was published in an anthology called Happy End. It is a small-format book, 4.5" x 6.5", one panel per page.
All the rest of the comics we did were in more conventional formats, so
when the collection was made by Drawn and Quarterly, they had to
enlarge the frames to adjust this story to the rest.
NRAMA: Have you re-read most of these stories in the time
between them being published and their inclusion in this book? Do you
have a favorite?
RM: Usually during the process of creating the story I love it,
and after it is published I hate it and cannot look at it without
seeing all its faults and all I could fix. The problem is when you
finish a project, the minute you finish it you can do it a lot better,
because you improved while working on it. After a year or two of
estrangement I can start liking the story again—but a bit of a
detachment is healthy with one's stories, like with one's kids.
The stories in the collection were picked from stories I did over the
last 10 years, and there is something I like in each of them. In
“Homecoming”, for example, it was the first time that I managed to put
Israeli reality into the comics without making a blunt political
statement. “Bygone” is the first story in which I found my own style of
writing. In “The Panty Killer” I like the freedom of the drawings, and
“Your Number One Fan” is the latest—so it's the one that I stand behind
the most.
NRAMA: How do you feel your work has evolved over the course of these stories and into Exit Wounds?
RM: As a young artist I felt the stories has to be “weird”,
write about the extreme, and my style was more grotesque, but during
the years I learned—the hard way—that life is much more grotesque and
weird than anything I can invent. My stories became more realistic, and
this influenced the drawing style as well. When writing, I find myself
reducing real life, which is often too dramatic or too symbolic to be a
good story.
Van Gogh wrote in one of his letters: “I exaggerate, I sometimes change
a motif, but in the end I don't invent the whole painting. Instead I
find it ready made in nature, though I still have to extract it.” I
copied this sentence and glued it above my desk, because it represents
so well what I try to do in my stories.
NRAMA: What are you working on next?
RM: I am now working on a serialized comic for the “Funny Pages” of The New York Times Magazine:
“The Murder of the Terminal Patient”. The story location is an Israeli
hospital—the same hospital my parents worked at, and where we lived.
There was a small neighborhood in the hospital area for the staff to
live in, which is quite strange to think of now, and, come to think of
it, might have affected my art.

I am still not sure what my next project will be—maybe another serial
for another magazine, or starting a new graphic novel like Exit Wounds. Anyway it is going to involved writing and drawing—I really feel terribly lucky to be able to do both and call it my day job.

Jamilti and Other Stories will be released in September. More information is available at Drawn and Quarterl